According to the frequently wrong but always wonkish-proclaiming Ezra Klein, this is where the Boehner-Obama negotiations are heading:

Boehner offered to let tax rates rise for income over $1 million. The White House wanted to let tax rates rise for income over $250,000. The compromise will likely be somewhere in between. More revenue will come from limiting deductions, likely using some variant of the White House’s oft-proposed, oft-rejected idea for limiting itemized deductions to 28 percent. The total revenue raised by the two policies will likely be a bit north of $1 trillion. Congress will get instructions to use this new baseline to embark on tax reform next year. Importantly, if tax reform never happens, the revenue will already be locked in.

On the spending side, the Democrats’ headline concession will be accepting chained-CPI, which is to say, accepting a cut to Social Security benefits. Beyond that, the negotiators will agree to targets for spending cuts. Expect the final number here, too, to be in the neighborhood of $1 trillion, but also expect it to lack many specifics. Whether the cuts come from Medicare or Medicaid, whether they include raising the Medicare age, and many of the other contentious issues in the talks will be left up to Congress….

As is always the case, the negotiations could fall apart, or the deal could change. But right now, the participants sound upbeat, surprised at how quickly the process has moved from evident disaster to near-agreement, and fairly comfortable with where they think they’ll end up.

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Somebody help me out. What is so bad about going off the financial cliff? Lots of spedning cuts! yay. And yes a tax increase too. But that will happen under any compromise deal anyway.

Sounds like Boehner is concerned that if the Rebublicans do not do a deal, B.O. and DEMS will spend the next year screaming about it and how bad Republcians are for the USA (with MSM support and amplification). The fear for Bohener and Company is loss CONTROL OF THE HOUSE in next election cycle? (I am very scared of that occuring too.. if BO has both houses and 2 years left.. watch out )

Fiscal Cliff: Largest Tax Hike in History on Jan 1, 2013 combined with the defense spending cuts in the sequester, also Jan 1, 2013 = guaranteed recession by next March.

So, the economy is going to go into reverse as a direct result of massive tax hikes and spending reductions (on spending that goes to actual production of goods, not mere redistribution).

Obama’s “solution” to this problem? Redefine the problem. Pretend the debate is about the deficit, for which the D solution is tax hikes and the R solution, supposedly, is spending cuts.

When the problem is massive tax hikes (about $7 trillion worth over ten years) and the solution is additional tax hikes ($1.6 trillion Obama wants), is there really any doubt that we’re going over the cliff even if they make a deal?

Oh, and wtf is Boehner thinking? He’s made ZERO effort to keep the debate focused on the economic impact of the tax hikes and defense cuts. None. He’s pre-emptively caved to Obama’s tax hike demands. He’s even pre-emptively surrendering the next fight on the horizon – offering to give Obama everything he could want on the debt ceiling.

Some Leader.

He hasn’t the slightest clue how to manage a negotiation. Or how to influence the media narrative.

Worse, he doesn’t seem to have any understanding of what it is Republicans pretend to stand for.

He’s even getting the politics wrong. Not only is he giving Obama everything he wants on policy, he’s doing it in a way that guarantees Republicans will be blamed when those policies inevitably fail.

Boehner would have been better off doing nothing. Literally. If he’d done absolutely nothing since election day, we would be in a better position right now. The fiscal cliff would still be coming and Obama has offered nothing to alleviate it. At least the R’s wouldn’t have tripped over themselves in their haste to offer to make it worse.

Why offer to take ownership, or even part ownership, of a policy you KNOW will be an unmitigated disaster? What’s the point of negotiating in secret to have a deal in place before legislation is even written when the other side has offered precisely NOTHING you want? The end result will either be entirely what the D’s want, or mostly what the D’s want, and nothing R’s stand for. Then, the R leadership will pressure their members to vote for it.

Worse, if they don’t, they now know their committee seats will be taken away.

Boehner is a disaster. He allowed his members to vote for the legislation that gave us the “fiscal cliff”. He is negotiating from a horrible position because his members put him there.

One party is so far left that its policies will ultimately destroy the country financially and crush what little remains of our individual liberty, and the other party is too stupid to persuasively communicate those facts to the public and prevent it from happening.

The one thing that truly honks me off about this whole “fiscal cliff” mess is that fact that “Weepy John” Boehner — who’s so GD desperate to cut a deal with Obummer — wouldn’t even be the Speaker of the House if the Tea Party folks hadn’t worked so hard to return the House to Republican control back in 2010.

It there was a personal financial reality that these jokers would have to pay attention to, they would be out broke on their butts.

Bernake too.

The difference between them and me/us worker bees, is that we have actual stakes in the game: we produce with voluntary exchange from consumers or shrivel up. The consumer PAYS with $ he’s (allegedly) earned by production, not just votes FANTASY.

To turn this around, it will take strategists and generals, $, coalitions, modern methods, field work, etc. Either a takeover of the RNC or 3rd party?

Starting with a convention? reminiscent of one long ago. I haven’t thought this through.

I have written to Boehner every day for the past four days, each letter shriller in tone the one before. The one today had vulgar %*^)%* in it. Something absolutely needs to be done to this man if he caves on this. It is embarrassing to have someone like this in a “leadership” position.

Our only hope is that Boehner is offering concessions he knows Obama will refuse, so when we go over the cliff the GOP can refer to those offers and point out the absence of like offers from Obama. Personally, I can’t assign Boehner nor the leaderless GOP this level of acumen at political chess, but I hope.

After the last four years of unprecedented, incontinent spending — not to mention the serial misrepresentations of Obamacare costs and entitlement burdens, not to mention the massive historical waste in the federal government we’ve put up with for generations — it is nothing less than a moral obscenity to go back to the American people for more money. This should be the Boehner and GOP position. Negotiating with this generational thief and shameless liar is a total self-debasement.

The executive has been operating without a budget for the last four years. It has participated in regime change on a massive scale. It has armed cartels and terrorists at home and around the world. It has diminished purchasing power thereby devaluing capital and labor. It selectively applies and enforces laws. It was reelected to continue these policies for another four years. It’s not clear that there is a legal recourse to resolve this constitutional crisis.

I don’t know the correct course. There is, however, a lot at stake with any direction we may follow. Perhaps this is a moment “to suffer, while evils are sufferable”. It is certainly a moment to gather your family, friends, and neighbors; but, it is always advisable to secure your relationships.

The issue is whether we prefer to be robbed (e.g. taxes) or burglarized (e.g. account deficits). Many people prefer to remain ignorant and elect the latter. It’s the out-of-sight and out-of-mind principle applied to government “revenue”. It’s the reason why accountability is often so difficult if not impossible, especially of Democrats.

Anyway, its better that people in both parties reveal their true natures than to further maintain a pretense of integrity. The only admirable quality of overt communists and socialists is that there is no uncertainty about their ambitions.

In the last election 37% of the GOP votes came from people 58 and older. Shift to chain CPI and effectively cut Social Security and undo the indexing of tax brackets that Reagan pushed through should not make many friends in that group.

One of the ironies of the Dems refusing to cut social security or medicare in any way is that the over-65s as a group are the wealthiest group in our society (which makes sense since they have had the most time to accumulate wealth).

The Democrats have cut the entitlement programs. They undercut their funding through the so-called “payroll tax holiday”. They have redistributed around 700 billion from Medicare to fund their (marginal) “universal” health care program. They have managed to finance this fraud through the maintenance of trillion dollar account deficits, which is the reduction of purchasing power, and devaluation of both capital and labor.

The only good thing about Democrats, is not all of them were involved in this degenerate behavior.

That said, both Democrats and Republicans have been party to this nonsense; but, the current stakeholders are Democrats.